WordPress for iPad: New Version

Ever since I bought my iPad I have been searching for a good blogging tool. I first tried the community supported WordPress application six months ago and was not impressed. The lack of rich text editing features made it little more then an HTML editor with some WordPress API integration. Writing posts from scratch was a clunky walk through angle-bracket land, nothing like the experience I had come to enjoy from Windows Live Writer.

A few days ago I heard that the newest version of the application now featured a richer editing bar. Excited I downloaded the update from the app store and fired it up to write this post. While there have been a couple of improvements, the rich editing bar is rather disappointing. Bold, Italic (but no underline) are supported very basically, there are options for hyperlinks, and a couple of other HTML constructs. However, there is still no rich text editing support and as a result complicated posts remain a sea of angle brackets and mark-up, which makes reviewing and editing the post content very difficult.

I remain hopeful that some day a rich blogging application will become available for the iPad, but today is not that day. This app is still and clunky and unhelpful as ever when it comes to writing anything more than a Twitter-like update only. Beyond plain text it is simply easier to wait until I get home and write on my PC.

That makes sense to me. I’ve been using Office2 HD for rich-text editing of Google Docs and was hoping I might be able to pair that with a blogging engine, but the formats just aren’t usably similar enough and I’d end up in markup land to fix it up.

I like the idea of composing drafts on the iPad and then formatting and publishing later.

Hopefully the market will react to the need for an app that:
* Supports rich-text editing and interactions without the need for direct interaction with angle-brackets
* Integrates with popular blogging service APIs